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The Georgia Tech Multi-Agent Robotics and Systems Lab (www.bio-tracking.org) is pleased to announce the release of their bio-tracking software, The Biotrack Pack. This open-source project makes use of our own Point Cloud Library, as well as other open source software such as OpenCV and QT.

This is the first iteration of a modular software suite for tracking and analyzing multiple agents. It is supported on Ubuntu Linux 64-bit operating systems, and a Mac version of the software has been released as well, although without official support at the moment.

Biotrack Pack development is led by PhD student Andy Quitmeyer and Prof. Tucker Balch. It was created with support from NSF Award 0960618 and ONR contract 550740. Matthew Flagg and Prof. James M. Rehg contributed to an earlier version of this software.

I've had a chance to play with the new suite a bit, and it's very nice! The interface is clean and easy to follow. The visual cues are very helpful, and its good to be able to toggle them. The Backgrounder and ModelMaker tools worked very well, and are a big help. Saving settings is fantastic, and makes tuning much more efficient. I went through all of the videos and wiki instructions and then tested everything by running a fresh video. After a bit of futzing with the parameters, it worked well. There is still some track stealing, but I did not necessarily optimize the parameters, so perhaps that could be reduced. Everything went pretty quickly, except for actual tracking, but that's OK since it can run unsupervised.